Longest title ever for one of the most delicious meals that has ever come out of my kitchen!

During the day I started brainstorming about what I was going to make for dinner. I have to take injections of B12 vitamins weekly because I am B deficient but I am not exactly diligent about doing it every week. The benefit has now become when I DO take them I have a weeks worth of energy packed into one day.

Well, yesterday was that day. I decided that since I had taken my vitamins I may as well plunge into a large cooking undertaking….so it goes. I found the muffin recipe online yesterday at 12ish, daydreamed about lamb chops, roasted veggies with the little red potatoes and some other yummy thing that I created, yay for improvisation!

The most beautiful thing to me about this meal is that I embarked on making 4 things I have NEVER made before and was totally OK with fumbling around the kitchen and just flying by the seat of my pants.

So here are the rough recipes for what I did yesterday: (I don’t measure so I can’t provide measurements for the ones I came up with, the one I kinda followed I will provide a link and describe my changes to it).

Apple Craisin Chutney – I was about to throw out a decent amount of apples, three small and two large. I felt guilty about wasting them so I decided to make something a bit different from my normal apples, cinnamon and sugar. I was watching one of the cooking shows and they made a pear something something chutney. I got the general idea of how it works and what you put in it, from there I made my own version. I don’t know how I feel about nutmeg and I HATE cloves so I left those out and just used the cinnamon.

I put the vinegar in a pan, warmed it up a little, added brown sugar, ginger, orange zest and onions. Then I let the sugar dissolve and get whole mixture almost boiling. I added the apples, cinnamon, sugar and craisins, brought that to a boil and then set it to simmer. I let it cook covered for 40 minutes and then uncovered till most of the liquid had evaporated. At the end I had to add more cinnamon and sugar to cut the acidity of the vinegar (think I will use less next time) but it did come out very interesting and good. It was awesome to eat this and the lamb together, mmmhhmm.

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Broiled Lamb chops were simple and fast, it was the perfect meat to add to this meal. Lamb chops were something that we ate growing up as kids. Mom made them the same way every time, just some seasoned salt and pepper and put the under the broiler to get all crispy and delicious.

I was expecting the same taste of what I grew up eating and I am happy to say that I nailed it! They were well done (which is how I wanted them and how I remember them) and that took about 7 minutes on each side on the setting High for Broil. I put a healthy dose of seasoned salt and pepper on each. They were AMAZING, I had this silly giant smile on my face when I was eating them because it was exactly what I wanted.

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Roasted Baby Red Potatoes and Veggies –

1 Bag of Baby Red Potatoes
2 small zuchini
2 small yellow squash
1 carrot
1 box of white mushrooms
I small turnip
Large Onion (I only used half, but next time I would use a lot more)
Roasted Red Peppers (I can’t eat the skin on the pepper because it aggravates arthritis, so I opted for the skinless roasted ones)
Onion Powder
Garlic Powder
Salt
Pepper
Fresh Thyme
Dried Rosemary
Dried Cilantro Leaves
Dried Oregano
Olive Oil
and I can’t remember if I used dill or not

I put the scrubbed potatoes (with some salt) in a pan in the oven to cook for the time it took me to chop up the rest of veggies. Then the veggies went into a large roasting pan followed by my olive oil and seasonings. I used a decent amount of rosemary in this one, where normally I wouldn’t do that for fear of overpowering it. Yesterday I was fearless in the kitchen. After those are tossed almost well enough I put the slightly cooked potatoes into the pan with the veggies. I roasted them for about an hour at 400˚. The one thing I would do differently next time would be to cook the onions, potatoes and mushrooms together only and the other veggies in a different pan. Some of the veggies got too a little too mushy for me, but they still tasted phenomenal!

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The corn/plantain muffins were the show-stopper of the day! I needed something to bake, as I very much miss baked goods. I was thinking about corn muffins or cornbread and then remembered I had two plantains sitting on my countertop ready to be used or thrown out. Yesterday was a save all the garbage food day and it was more delicious than a go out and buy everything day! hahahaha.

So I searched online for corn and plantain muffin and what do you know? I found a recipe someone had created for just that. The only problem? Not GLUTEN FREE. I decided instead of trying to search the gluten free community (which really is amazing) to find one that was I would take my chances and try my hand at converting it over to gluten free with the Xanthum Gum and all purpose GF baking flour I already had at home. I’ll never learn if I am not willing to gamble with something new….trying to remember that.

Preheat an oven to 350 degrees F. Line 6 small muffin cups and 6 giant muffin cups with paper liners.

Stir the flour, xanthum gum, sugar, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl. Whisk the almond milk, plantains, eggs, oil, and 50/50 melted butter together in a separate bowl. Mix the flour mixture into the milk mixture until just combined; do not over mix. Allow the mixture sit at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes. Pour into prepared muffin cups to about 2/3 full.

Bake in the preheated oven until golden and the tops spring back when lightly pressed, 15 to 18 minutes for the small muffins, 20-25 for the large muffins.

The muffins had the texture of regular muffins and tasted absolutely fabulous! I am so happy to have gotten a baking recipe to work the way I wanted it to on the first try! It gives me a lot of hope and know I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything. There would be no way someone could tell the difference between a regular corn plantain muffin and this gluten free one. Here’s to success! and eating dough like things that don’t all taste like rice! Wooohooo!!!!! These are desert and breakfast. We are using the large ones for breakfast muffins and the small ones for after dinners. I can’t wait to experiment more with this all purpose flour and the xanthum gum.

Here is a picture of my whole meal all together 🙂

and yes the measuring cup does say cat food in the batter picture….my boyfriend thought it would be funny if we ran that through the dishwasher (vet gave me a special scoop for the kitty food) and used it for cooking people food! I just realized it is in the picture, hahahahah. Fantastic.